Tonight no music, just talk about music education.First, an interesting story about how youngsters are creating opera from very basic and cheap basic materials. I am all for it, if it is a question of making them appreciate classical music and take away eventual fear of classical and opera.

Not if it is just therapeutic “self-expression”, having “fun” with music. Even less if it’s Everybody can write an opera-amateur evening.

-Why so stern?

Because I see around me an increasing lack of respect for writing an opera. It has become trendy to write operas.

Don’t do it! I would say, as Frank Zappa. Pop musicians around me are, so they tell me, writing symphonies. Okay… Piece of cake, right? (I have still not written my first.)

No, there’s n use in making things more difficult than they are, but definitely no use in making them simpler either. Do not teach kids composition, we have more than enough bad music in the world. Heed the declaration of Cyril Connoly:

“The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked!”

Neither do we need iridescent mediocrity in music and opera. Let talented children be hungry, struggle a bit, show their true colors and urgency, instead of making “creatives” out of them.

That new noun (creative) indicates where we are heading. A “creative” is not an artist, and might never be one, but sure, she creates something. So does a cook or a seamstress or shoe-maker, however these latter are happy not being called “creatives”. Let’s not turn art into a kindergarten or child’s play. The whole Homo Ludens thing shouldn’t end up in one big circus of dilettantism.

But I see it has already been done. “How to write an Opera Libretto in 5 steps”, a two minute long video on YouTube. Good God, don’t encourage people! Art will turn into a mere question of having a good time, and before we can say “leitmotif” we will have The Boy next door-operas and The girl-next-door-operas.

Fun to check out what kind of opera your neighbors wrote, right? Well, not for me. I want a masterpiece or at least something aiming for it. How rare that is nowadays…

The other really interesting thing of the evening was demonstration of soundpainting. This is a kind of loosely directed (audience) improvisation. No music reading skills needed, hardly even instruments. However, we got to choose something from a table full of small sound-producing tools.

It is attractive the see the sign-language of the soundpainting director. A kind of conducting with specific signals. But what was most interesting to me came at the end when we the audience, without any instruments, just used our voices in a small improvisation.

I intentionally shut my mouth and just listened. And this totally impromptu minute or two was actually very impressive! If I had heard this from a CD I would have asked “Who wrote THIS?”.

Answer; nobody. No writing involved. Also, not reproducible.

My thoughts went to a recording of Messiaen’s “Cinq Rechants” and Xenakis’ “Nuits”. But those compositions are very difficult and need great choir singers. Here, without trying, we produced something not very dissimilar.

I am not drawing any conclusions from this, but it makes me wonder… If, sound-wise, you can reach such results with a conductor and a nonprofessional audience (though I suspect that many in the audience were serial visitors), why do we need a composer…?

If I had interacted and been part of it, I would have experienced it differently. But now I went to the Ying side and just listened. Interesting…

Full house, maybe around 100. I think the venue has something to do with it; they often have their “own” audience. Otherwise it’s hard to understand the chasm between 4 listeners one day and 100 another.

Tonight black box performance. That’s the word that comes to mind. To call it “concert” doesn’t feel right. The evening is very digital-analog. Computers and some kind of sound manipulation in all the pieces.

It starts off, I am sorry to say (but why should I be sorry?) with one more perceptual exercise. Four musicians standing in front of / interacting with four laptops, plus they are also visually projected onto a screen behind them.

Okay…

The volume is loud, almost painfully so. Lots of infra-sounds as well, and it strikes me that if we turned this up a few more steps we’d have an efficient instrument of torture. I am reminded of the great but neglected Swedish composer Ulf Björlin. He once said to me: “Sure, I don’t mind a full orchestra playing FFF, but then preferably it should be a triad.”

How refreshing — that’s when I understood that Ulf didn’t care one iota about his “modern composer image”.

I am of course aware that when I say “torture” this is exactly what many an inexperienced layman would say about much modern music. And of course they would be totally dismissed. Nobody cares about their ignorant opinions. But sometimes the view of the outsider and the insider (me) meet and fuse.

After that, instrumental music: strings, bass clarinet. Always with manipulation through MAX. Most of it feels too long. It is an art to finish a piece. I sit and think “Now… would be a great exit… No? Ok… now? No? Okay… try again.”

I would think that this aspect, finishing in an organic way, would be as important (if not more so) with modernistic as well as with more traditional music. Or does one actually want to send the message “keep on keeping on…”? Is this some kind of Satiesque celebration of dullness? If it is, it’s hard to notice.

I fear it is just not caring very much about listener reception-perception.

Again, I have to say “been there, heard that before”. Not much variation, and nothing that feels really fresh. When after the intermission the four musicians enter nude for more of the same (laptop interaction) one gets a slightly different focus (the bare bodies) but of course this is not new or fresh either.

The general feeling is treading water, being caught in a roundabout, old hat with new machines.

But this time I have been reading up a bit. This is from the ensemble’s homepage. Read it aloud, it’s almost poetry.

…A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed.”

Sounds like something from 60s conceptual art mag Art & Language. Back to the future!

When on the subject of conceptual art, I found this snippet from Wikipedia truly funny (unlike tonight’s performance I am sorry to say). Read as prose, and laugh.

“In 2002, Ivan Massow, the chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, branded conceptual art “pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat” and in “danger of disappearing up its own arse … led by cultural tsars such as the Tate’s Sir Nicholas Serota.” Massow was consequently forced to resign. At the end of the year, the Culture Minister, Kim Howells (an art school graduate) denounced the Turner Prize as “cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit”.

I think we need to get rid of our modern fear of the word “bullshit” and stop being such prim schoolmistresses. Let’s be RADICAL for a change.

Tonight opera! Around 10 people in the small room. Again I must stress that I am not writing reviews here (that’s one reason for not writing details of what I’ve heard). These are impromptu impressions, but if I know myself correctly a review would not be very different, only more polished, formal, perhaps a bit more cowardly. (Or not.)

So, opera about Mozart. I was once involved in a film project about Mozart, that’s when I wrote my short Mozart paraphrases. But this is no film but an opera, about opera. Opera from a back-stage perspective.

In that context I should mention that great and very funny Swedish opera-film Bröderna Mozart by Susanne Osten. I was involved in that one, too, played piano on the soundtrack. But enough namedropping.

Tonight I left after the first act, which I of course wouldn’t have done as a regular reviewer. The attraction was not there. According to the presenter this is the most interesting and humorous opera of the last ten years. I don’t know what that says most about, this opera or the last ten years.

Clearly the people behind the piece know a thing or two about what happens in an opera house. The funniest line (from the singer playing the conductor in the piece): Who is this cellist? I’ve never seen him before. Why do we have different cellists every night…? That says something about the level of humor here.

When we meet people with a defect like stammering we are supposed to be very understanding and tolerant. But what if a composer decides that (almost) every time he comes to the end of sentence (which he wants to stress), he repeats it 3-4 times, repeats it 3-4 times, repeats it 3-4 times? That’s worse than stammering, and it’s a pity that that is one of the strongest impressions I took with me from the screening.

The piece could have been humorous, even with a not very funny text, if humor would have been allowed to enter through the musical door. Let’s see, when did I hear a funny modern piece last? They do exist, and I am reminded of the Swedish opera “Näsflöjten” by Fredrik Österling, actually not very far from this piece. Näsflöjten was a meta-opera about the politics of culture. Very to the point, and very funny.

But humour doesn’t happen if you put your foot in the door when Funny wants to enter. I had the feeling this happened here. Or maybe humor was never an aim at all. Satire certainly (?) was.

One obvious part of “funny” is to let styles clash, even to the point of derailing the musical train. For me it would have been so obvious to allow some original music by Mozart, not just distorted varieties. But no, The Style was adhered to; the train went on time, sticking to the timetable and the familiar grooves. We were served some morsels of jazz, but never too “dirty”, always within the box.

I felt a bit sorry for the singers, too, which brings us to another, and more general point. Having worked for many years with opera * I have pondered the problems of opera, and generally how to write for singers.

*(Some of the modern operas I worked with as pianist and coach: Der Grosse Makaber (Ligeti); Besuch altes dame (Einem); Siddharta & Gilgamesh (Nörgård); Midsummer Marriage (Tippet), and other less known stuff.)

What strikes me is the modern composer’s unhappy relation with the singer, and with the voice. Of course there are exceptions but I venture that the rule is unhappy.

Generally composers put an honor in being at least somewhat proficient in orchestration. You must know what double stops are (im)possible for strings, and read up on harp technique before writing for harp.

That respect seem to be lacking when it comes to writing for voice. Many composers don’t seem to understand that the voice is no harp or xylophone. Nevertheless I have seen SO many vocal parts that looked like xylophone parts.

So this is what I would like to convey to composers who mistake their wives for a hat, I mean a voice for a xylophone:

Every instrument has a “soul” or at least demands a certain knowledgeable love in order to bring out the best of it. This is doubly true of a singer, because apart from him being an instrument, he is also a human. Tricky…

Due to this double function singers need special treatment. They should be thought of not only as instruments but also as people.

You wouldn’t treat your friends or acquaintances as xylophones, so why singers? You don’t write a woodwind part for strings or a piano part for a tuba. Then write a vocal part for voice!

It is very logical really, but it is a logic that has got lost in the mud of modern music. What is lacking is simply LOVE. Love of the person, love of the voice, which is really a remarkable element of human life.

Composers have treated the voice worse than Hansel and Gretel were treated by her evil stepmother. Stepmotherly is the word. And again and again the Composer has his Ready Reply (coming from the Little Red Book of composer-protective cliches: “I want to treat the voice as an instrument!”

Dummy! The voice IS an instrument. It’s a voice! You want to treat it as different instrument, a clarinet or piano or xylophone.

This double role of the singer means for me as composer that I want to make life, if not paradise, then at least not hell for the singer.

I want the singer to feel like a singer, a human and not a tone and rhythm-producing machine. A sensual being with no sharp boundaries between body and instrument. Singers are for this reason more hedonistic than other instrumentalists. This is nothing strange if you give it some thought, and don’t mix things up and veer in the sadistic direction.

Don’t spoil singers, but don’t torture them either.

Opera is also a close relative to theater, and for me don’t mix very well with the level of abstraction often used in modern music. In plain language, often a kind of theater music as asked for, maybe even film music thinking. This may insult some composers who hold themselves above such pragmatic thinking. Considering that Mozart, Verdi or Wagner didn’t one suspects that composers of our times are possibly the most arrogant of all generations of composers.

And yes, the question also has to do with melodies, a subject that for many modern composer is a closed chapter (if it ever even was opened). I love melodies, am not bad at writing them, and see the loss of melody as a tragic aspect of the development / decline of music.

But what are singer best at if not melodies? A beautiful girl is like a melody, and a melody is like a beautiful girl… The voice is made for melody.

Sure, the more dry matter or a recitative is also near to the voice, but it is basically holding long notes that singers really enjoy. This should obviously not be encouraged too much, nor frivolously, but it also should not be forgotten.

But since I am a lover of melodies, and a composer of melodious music, I am probably just talking to myself here. For all of this has little bearing on most modern composers, who are enemies, or ignorers, of melody. This aspect alone (the loss of melody) explains in a large degree why audiences have turned their backs to contemporary music.

Is it wrong if the music sounds familiar, as if you have already heard it? If I speak a language, I use the same words over and over, right? Classical North Indian music is built around 200 ragas, they have been used for many centuries, and every concert today still sounds new.

Good question, and it deserves more than one answer.

First, we know that even in popular music, novelty is more or less desirable and asked for. Generally, it would play a small(er) role in dixieland or country music. Some artists, like David Bowie or Frank Zappa, painted themselves into a corner where their audience (and critics) required constant novelty and renewal: they were almost outraged if they didn’t get it.

This is somewhat the case with modern contemporary music, at least to the extent that is presents itself and wants to be viewed as

radical

modern

avant-garde

innovative

experimental

rebellious

revolutionary

We know that just these words have been used again and again about 20th century music and composers — by critics, historians and the composers themselves.

Now I can well imagine some composers who do not see themselves in these terms (I personally would tick “radical” and “rebellious”, for my own reasons, and with my own interpretation of the words). But we also need to be honest and admit that for quite some time now there exists a phenomenon, an anomaly that could be called Traditional Avant-gardism, or Mainstream Modernism, built on an idea of Orthodox Rebellion.

Meaning that one writes in and belongs to a tradition, even an orthodoxy, but still calls (and sees) oneself a a kind of “rebel” or “revolutionary”. Forgetting that it is always the last trend, style, dogma that one needs to rebel against — if rebel one must – not the penultimate, or one that is already dusty…

The above keywords can be seen as Trademarks (TM) for much of the music written in the last 100 years. From this viewpoint, my criticism of music that “sounds just like modern music sounded 60 years ago, only not as good” is that: — you cannot call yourself modern or avant-garde for decades on end, while doing more or less that same thing that you and others have been doing for a LONG time.

There are others on the stage more modern and avant-garde than you, so this is a kind of Best Before-question.

Some of us (like me) don’t care about being “modern”, but many others do. So it’s a question of misleading labeling or marketing.

Or let’s just say marketing, which can be bad enough if we are talking about art. Sure, my symphony or opera might get some embarrassingly laudatory presentations from some PR-person, but I need not be that PR person. I notice that some modern composers are. Their salesmanship is sometimes better than their music, so maybe they should be agents for others…? Also from an economic viewpoint.

Another aspect of this has to do with signal and noise, or let’s say text (within) and outside parentheses.

It is nothing original to suggest that our times views and treats itself as a parenthesis. It writes, not like Keats but still, in water.

We in the West say “The medium is the message”. So let’s look at two ways of approaching media, and keep the image of Keat’s grave in mind.

(Both examples from memory since I don’t have my books handy.)

Clifford Stoll (super-hacker, astronomer and wonderful eccentric) describes in his book “Silicon Snake Oil” how he wanted to save some important astronomical data, but also wanted to be real sure that it didn’t get lost. So he saved to 5-6 different formats; tape, floppy disc, etc.

After some years many if not most machines for reading his data resided in museums! That’s how incredibly fast things get unreadable [turn parenthetical] in the West. A case of File Format Obsolescence.

The other example is from the Orient. A certain karate master was the last person who knew a certain Martial Arts form in its entirety. His pupils were understandably anxious that it should not die with him; it had be saved somehow. But how? In what medium? After long pondering they found the optimal solution; carving it on stone tablets!

We Westerners with our digital media, discs and tapes and USB-sticks that will soon be impossible to read (due to our craze for “updating”, which is actually a form of Progeria, accelerated ageing) truly write in water[y parentheses], while those Martian Arts people wrote on stone.

If we Westerners valued our writings, thoughts, insights more highly we would choose less volatile media. But I don’t think we do, if we are frank. We feel we are living in a period of transition, we are neither heads nor tails but the edge of the coin, a thin slice which doesn’t REALLY matter, or only matters until the next technological “revolution” sends our media readers to a museum in one more case of File Format Obsolescence.

This ties in very much with John Cage and all things “experimental”. Experiment comes from Latin experiri: “to try, test”. Of course there are always elements of experimentation in music: trying out new fingerings, different bowings, a different chord or instrumentation.

Experimentation has its place but let’s not lose sight of Yoda’s advice: Do not try, do! Our modern love of experiments and things experimental is truly trying, in more ways than one. Because anybody can experiment. There’s nothing to it. Just look around at current experiments in painting, poetry, performance, spoken word, photography, etc.

Everybody can try but not everybody can do. If that sounds like blasphemy to you then HURRAY… I’ve succeeded in being radical, modern, avant-garde, rebellious and even revolutionary!

We don’t eat experiments in restaurants, we don’t drive around in experimental cars, don’t fly in experimental aeroplanes, and so on. But we use experimental software (never finished, never grownup, always in need (it seems) of updates, upgrades and “fixes”) and we — some of us — consume experimental art and music.

All this has to do partly with ambition, partly with result.

Do you, composer, intend to write something with the hope of it becoming repertory, that is, being played again and again, enjoyed (hopefully) by a larger number of people than 27? And do you, composer, actually succeed in writing something that becomes (if it gets a fair hearing, which is of course not guaranteed) repertory and is being played again and again, enjoyed by a larger number of people than 27?

Something people will want to hear a second time?

Everybody wants to write repertory pieces, someone suggests. I am positive that is not the case. Some just want to fool around and enjoy the thrill of connecting dots, pressing buttons, inputting data into Finale or Sibelius just for the hell of it, or fiddling with patch cords.

Cordially yours.

In a way this is like producing a food product. Will it be edible just for a short while? Must it be kept on ice? Or can it stand room temperature, for years? Will your piece (we would call it short-term music) sound dated right away, at least to experienced listeners, or will it survive changes of weather, fashion, even cultural paradigm shifts?

Well, I know what my ambition is.

So back to my friends question: Must the piece be new, sound new? Is it a bad thing thing if it reminds us of something else?

I would say: Not a bad thing if it reminds of an earlier doing, but a disappointment if it sounds like an earlier trying (= experiment).

Much of 20th century music is experimental, or experiments. Even composers are called “experimental” (!), without anyone raising an eyebrow. While an experiment in and of the 60s could be new, novel and refreshing back then, a grand-child or clone of it today will just make me think of grandfather. And I will want to ask “Why?”.

Here many a composer is helped by the fact of listener inexperience. In other art spheres many a audience member (or YouTube commentator) is impressed by experimental art that is just a copy of 60s Concept Art. But since he knows nothing of Concept Art he thinks that there is something original in this rehash of 60 year old experiments!

Say what you will, Concept Art was revolutionary (in a bad way, but still). There is nothing revolutionary or daring in doing copies of the same buffoonery 60 years later. If you do that, you are a traditionalist. However, you probably want to look like a rebel… which brings us back to the BBDD (Best Before Date Dilemma).

So what I am in a way saying when I criticize pieces by “I’ve heard it before” is that they remind me of gestures, attempts, in a word, experiments that are old by now, and that haven’t convinced me of any possibility or even ambition to become repertory, of addressing Humanity and not just to a small sub-cultural clique.

Morton Feldman said it outright: We don’t need listeners and a great many composers agree with him, if not in word then in deed.

Turning your back to audience, whether it was a select salon audience, the Church, some rich aristocrat or the entire bourgeoisie, was probably impossible and unheard of until some 100 years ago. Now it has turned into a virulent bad habit (or just tradition), showing and manifesting itself by its mirror image: The audience turning its back to the composer.

Finally let’s talk about, not The Sound of Music, but The Sound of Modern Music. How was it my friend said? If I speak a language, I use the same words over and over, right?

By this time (2018) there has crystallized a set of habits and manners that can, with just a wee bit prejudice, be called the Standardized Rules of Typical Modern Music.

Favor intervals like seconds, sevenths and augmented fourths.

Avoid intervals formerly regarded as perfect: Octave, fifth and fourth, then also thirds as sixths.

No triads. That way Harmony lies!

Favor irregularity before regularity, angular before rounded, fragmented before whole.

Do give the audience a shock from time to time. Why not most of the time? Think Haydn Surprise until it becomes Haydn Non-Surprise.

Whatever you do, don’t write melodies. (This is easy, since writing good melodies is hard.)

This is not so much a language but an anti-language.

So when I say that “I’ve heard it before” it can mean that the composer in question adheres to these negative rules maybe as strictly as composers of old adhered to an opposite set of rules. Only for a badder reason: mainly avoidance.

When I hear music following this dogma I am often surprised and stunned by the conformity, even orthodoxy, of the Modern Composer. He often is so square, so well-behaved and downright proper that my jaw hangs. I want a modern composer to sound like himself, not like “modern music”.

–Yes, but do you use the same set of requirements with the First Wiennese School for example? They use Alberti bass all the time…

The answer to that is that the universe and rules of Beethoven or Mozart or Bach are very different from the rules I have sketched above — which are a set of non-rules or anti-rules, based primarily on avoidance, doing the opposite thing. That is kind of a defiant and juvenile.

I don’t know about you but I find matter more interesting than anti-matter, a person more interesting then his mirror image (which is just a reflex), principles more interesting then mere knee-jerk defiance. Thus, what I hear in modern music is not so much language – with language you supposedly should be able to say anything: Catastrophe, verfremdung, alienation as well as cozy dinner by the open fire, happy, friendly, gleeful — but only a small, partial selection of a language, a cut-out, a fragment or a limb of a language.

The way I compose, not fearing neither triads, melodies or regularity, I am free to use harsh, angular dissonance or clusters when and if I desire, but am equally free to use pleasing, even ingratiating consonance. There are no taboos in my music, thus I can take a walk in any corner of the Garden of Emotions. I can use elements of jazz, modernism, even pop music, freely. Because music, much more than information, wants to be free.

Two films, about Varèse and Cage. I watch the second at home on YouTube. For the first film, only 4 souls in the audience.

Well, Varèse I’ve always liked and respected. As to the film, I find this review (from Variety) quite to the point. My underlinings.

"The life and influence of French-American composer Edgard Varese are explored in monotonous fashion in “The One All Alone,” the latest nonfiction feature by Dutch helmer Frank Scheffer (“Conducting Mahler”). Alternating adulatory talking heads shot on functional HD with long musical interludes set to only tangentially related archival footage, Scheffer’s film would work just as well as a radio documentary. Title, referring to one of Varese’s works, might suggest the pic’s chances in wider distribution.

Scheffer calls on Chou Wen-chung, Varese’s protege, as well as contempo composers and conductors such as Elliot Carter (already the subject of a previous Scheffer docu), Pierre Boulez and Riccardo Chailly, to explain the importance and uniqueness of Varese’s work. Carefully picked speakers all agree he was a visionary but do little else besides fawn over his achievements. Work is too incomplete and dry to function as an intro to Varese for the musically curious, but also lacks the critical distance and rigor required to start discussions among the cognoscenti. The choice to have all foreigners speak in heavily accented English is odd; tech credits are just OK.”

This is a rather disrespectful review, the kind I sometimes also write. I thought there were some typos there, but it seems Variety has it’s own slanguage. Interesting…

“Helmer” means director, and “contempo”, that word I understand even if it is new to me.

Of course Varèse is interesting, and I should probably talk about him and his role in modern music. But I actually find the review more interesting as a takeoff for today’s reflection.

Respect is central to modern music. In many ways and varieties.

Respect. Lack of respect. But also a third important variety: disrespect.

Disrespect is not lack of respect; it is something, while lack of respect is nothing, just absence.

Disrespect is active and cares, at least enough to say something. Sometimes just rubbish, sometimes something very appropriate and to the point.

"Tell your students: "DON'T DO IT! STOP THIS MADNESS! DON'T WRITE ANY MORE MODERN MUSIC!" (If you don't, the little stinker might grow up to kiss more ass than you, have a longer, more dramatic neck-scarf, write music more baffling and insipid than your own, and Bingo, there goes your tenure!)"

This was Frank Zappa’s addressing ASUC (American Society of University Composers). Very funny, very irreverent. We who are familiar with the world of composers see that Zappa knows what he is talking about.

And he does it, I suggest, in a caring way. But let’s go deeper into this question of respect.

There are books, poems, musical pieces, photographs that I respect very much. I might express this somehow, in spoken word or writing. Other books, poems, musical pieces, photographs (a much larger number) I don’t really respect or care about. I ignore them, do not even waste words on them.

For me both respect and disrespect are expressions, while lack of respect is just lack: silence.

Disrespect can be criticism, and criticism can be disrespectful. We can broadly differentiate between two kinds: criticism from ignorance or from “informance” (being informed). To a bystander they might sound the same, but they are actually very different animals.

The similarity lies in “I don’t like this”, the difference in WHY (and whether I can motivate “why”?).

When I sometimes criticize modern music, the first and most banal reaction is “don’t listen to him, he is ignorant”. Disrespect and criticism must come from ignorance, that is the common and popular view, especially in modern music. It is also a comfortable and defensive view, since it serves as bulwark against attacks.

What to say about attacks on modern music?

There’s an entire book by Nicolas Slonimsky about them: “Lexicon of Musical Invective.”

Slonimsky takes the usual, predictable, partisan view that good musicians and composers have always been dissed. That is to be expected and only normal. Following Slonimsky one risks falling into the (il)logical well of “If people say something is shit today it is almost bound to be a MBFIT (masterpiece before its time).”

If only it were so simple. One could also postulate the possibly more true, and more disrespectful, “If people love it today it is bound to be shit in the long run.”

So, here are our bricks: Respect, disrespect, criticism, attack. How do they relate to modern music and to Present Day Composer who refuses to die?

Officially modern music gets respect. I would like to hear a politician, minister of culture or head of a concert house say “We don’t like this modern music, and next year we will play less of it and give it less money (quasi niente)”. No, that does not sound good.

Let’s realize that we live in a world where EUPHONY is of utmost importance. Words, sentences, phrases should (irrespective of what is behind them, if anything) SOUND GOOD. In a superficial, buzzwordy way; more is not asked for.

So of course we don’t hear such phrases from a minister of culture. Modern music gets verbal, and to a degree, financial “respect”. It is close to lip-service, because how often does this minister of culture actually visit and sit through modern music concerts (apart from mingling on festival opening nights)?

So this I would call verbal “respect”. Note the quotation mark.

…

The other film (I watched it at home) was “How to get out of the cage”. Same film maker as before, partly overlapping with the earlier Cage film. This was longer and better.

Just a few comments, since I need to sleep, and should work on my own compositions, not write this lengthy diary.

0) Why two films about Cage? One gets the impression, once again, that Cage is very important. (In a way I agree, but not in the usual modernistic way.)

1) The title is incredibly interesting. I would translate/ rephrase it to “How to get out of the John Cage“.

We need too heal and neutralize the influence of John Cage. His harmful influence was not his fault, but rather the fault of writers of music history who proclaimed him Seminal Composer. It’s time to revise, question and even blaspheme. I am pretty sure Cage wouldn’t have wanted to be a sacred cow, what he in many ways has become.

2) The longer I watch the film the more I like Cage as a person. He is the kind of guy I would like to have as a neighbor and invite to my parties. But as to his influence on music, see point 1.

3) Enough. There is much more to say about the film, and even more about RESPECT (you noticed I left off in the middle of a train of thought). Later perhaps. I am tired and a bit angry that this is taking so much of time. (To be continued.)

This evening, two films. Not full house tonight, just around 10 people for each film.

The title of the evening is interesting:

Present Day Composer Refuses to Die I.

So, first round of death refusal? A number of question are born from that title.

Why should Present Day Composer die?

Who says he is dying?

What is he dying of?

Why is he not dying? Maybe it’s time…?

What does Present Day Composer NOT refuse?

etc.

So clearly the idea of death, or disappearance, or non-significance is on the table. It should be. If it wasn’t something would be very wrong indeed; that would indicate that present day composer was asleep, or drugged, or unconscious. Clearly there are problems related to life and death here.

The first film is called “Time is music” and is mainly about two figures: Elliot Carter and John Cage.

I never found a reason to be interested in Carter, and still haven’t. Might do later, or not.

Cage I have thought a lot about. I also reviewed the DVD “John Cage – Journeys in sound” by Allan Miller & Paul Smaczny.

All in all, this well made film is about the American music scene. Some short comments from Boulez, Kagel, Tudor, but mainly Carter and Cage talking.

And the whole thing is SO seducing, in a way. Not for everybody of course, but for some of us. Because what is conveyed here is freedom, limitlessness, throwing away old traditions and fetters, freeing sounds, musicians listening…

I can feel it myself, this somewhat intoxicating feeling of no boundaries. But I sober up. A feeling is a feeling, a drug a drug.

And it seems in retrospect that when Western culture proclaimed John Cage as one of the “seminal composers” of the 20th century, it was similarly intoxicated and drugged. Because it saw, and looked at, what it had gained.

But not at what it lost in the process.

It gained this intoxicating, Anything-goes freedom. It lost a sense of wholeness and another sense of freedom: a freedom where one is free because one cooperates with others.

It lost its sense of service, the feeling of Something Greater than I. Also a sense of aristocracy of sounds: if listening to finger-tapping on the table or somebody dragging a chair on the floor is comparable and equivalent to a string chord or a sonata movement, then why have string chords or a sonata movements at all?

Let’s just have finger-tapping and chair dragging and such. It will be much cheaper. Easier to produce those sounds, also. And if we peradventure want an old-fashioned string chord we can just SAMPLE it. In a rudely frank language that’s STEALING it, but never mind such rude language. We want to be enthusiastic about this freedom, so let’s not spoil it with frank language, please.

In short: if there are no wrong sounds, there are no right sounds either. Nothing is holy, hardly anything is good.

My impression from the Cage DVD was that this man is sincere, and naive. He is not manipulating us, just surfing along on the wave of a Zeitgeist that for a while saw him as seminal and important, and afterwards forgot to revise his importance.

Cage’s “importance” says much more about Western culture than about Cage.

An interesting paradox is that while the music of Carter is sometimes ridiculously pedantically notated (check this out)

and the music of Cage is often very free and hardly notated at all, they sound rather similar.

Of course a trained ear can hear the difference but even for lay music lovers it would not be very big. This leads to a central question for musicians, and now I mean “normal” musicians, not modern music specialists:

Why should I invest so much time and energy figuring out the above notation (I mean, dotted 8th-note equals 163.3… ?!), if the end results might sound, well, not identical but almost the same as if I just improvise?

I think Present Day Composer might have given that question to little, if any, thought. This is part of the Iron Wall between composer and musician, a very sad state of affair. The table is wobbly, balance is lost.

I say this because I am a musician, composer, arranger, critic and music philosopher. Things belong together. All parts are important. They interact, can be good, bad or mediocre. All can be praised, or criticized.

But in practice this ain’t so. Composers are not criticized. They complain about not being played enough, about conservative programs, about the limitation of musicians. And sure, we musicians can be lazy and comfortable at times. But basically we cannot afford it; we get fired.

The sins of composers however are never mentioned. They cannot be fired, because often they are not even hired.

A main reason why I write all this is because somebody not a saint who nevertheless gets saintly status (=is never criticized) doesn’t develop.

If you never tell me what I am doing wrong, how can I improve? If modern composers (generally speaking now) never hear criticism (of course it exists; I hear it from singers or musicians when I play in an orchestra) they get lulled even more into the illusion of being Somehow Perfect.

Uninteresting for most people, yes, but still Somehow Perfect.

It takes guts, courage and knowledge to dare to criticize modern composers. Most people pass on that, thus allowing the composer class to live in ignorance of 1) what people (including musicians) think of their music 2) their faults.

There’s much to say about this, just one general thing and criticism. People like Carter and Cage seem to be so in control: Carter in his precise 8th-note equals 163.3, Cage with his dice throwing and I Ching. However, they both (and so many others) seem totally clueless, have no control AT ALL of the Emotional Parameter.

What feelings and emotions does my music convey?

This has been a main concern with older composers, and still is with composers outside the art music domain. But Present Day Composer seems to regard this as unimportant. Or he just follows in the footsteps of the modern masters, Schoenberg, Webern, etc. who parked their car, pitched their tent in a very specific corner of the Garden of Emotions. Namely the corner of Alienation, Pain, Loneliness, Anger, Despair, and sundry variations of the above.

This is what laymen (more concerned with emotions than tones and rhythms) hear in much modern music. We who are used to it manage somehow not to notice this emotional monomania, this clinging to what in Star Wars is called the Dark Side.

The Dark Side has become the Good Side for many Present Day Composers. So they wallow in dissonance, conflict, friction, tension, etc. In this way they are very much like the news on TV. Always the bad news are highlighted. Misery, accidents, war, tension — such bad news is Good TV (thus good news).

Modern music is often just as banal in its choice of emotions to highlight. Often it seems to FEAR harmony, happiness, comfort, coziness (which we find so much of in the old classics). Even the feelings of friendship, friendliness I seldom meet. Always the sharp, pointed, broken, cutting, ragged affects.

And it is getting SO boring, SO predictable…!

The second film was about Frank Zappa.

It is not very strange to show a film about Zappa on such a festival but there are some important comments to make here.

We know about the temptation to “own” this or that figure, to add his light to your special minority or community.

Stephen Sondheim, Tchaikovsky and many others add lustre (and pride) to the Gay community. Some claim that Haydn and even Beethoven were black (Negroes). Jews are very precise about who they own and keep long lists about who is It and Non-it.

We Hungarians are maybe the worst. We like to brag about all our inventors and Nobel Prize Winners. The Hungarian language, admittedly fancy and even fantastic, is supposedly the Cosmic Root Language from Outer Space. Some go so far as to claim Jesus as Hungarian.

So of course the Modern Music Community wants to “own” this very original figure Frank Zappa.

They perhaps don’t know about or conveniently forget his keynote address at the 1984 convention of the American Society of University Composers (ASUC). It starts like this:

"I do not belong to your organization. I know nothing about it. I'm not even interested in it - and yet, a request has been made for me to give what purports to be a keynote speech.

Before I go on, let me warn you that I talk dirty, and that I will say things you will neither enjoy nor agree with.

You shouldn’t feel threatened, though, because I am a mere buffoon, and you are all Serious American Composers.”

And it ends in the same vein, only even better:

"Change the name of your organization from ASUC to "WE"-SUCK, get some cyanide and swizzle it into the punch bowl with some of that white wine 'artistic' people really go for, and Bite The Big One!

If the current level of ignorance and illiteracy persists, in about two or three hundred years a merchandising nostalgia for this era will occur – and guess what music they’ll play! (They’ll still play it wrong, of course, and you won’t get any money for having written it, but what the hey? At least you didn’t die of syphilis in a whorehouse opium stupor with a white curly wig on.)

… Tell your students: “DON’T DO IT! STOP THIS MADNESS! DON’T WRITE ANY MORE MODERN MUSIC!” (If you don’t, the little stinker might grow up to kiss more ass than you, have a longer, more dramatic neck-scarf, write music more baffling and insipid than your own, and Bingo!”

BINGO, there goes your tenure!

Merchandising nostalgia, ROFL!! Of course one wants to “own” a guy like this! Who wouldn’t? (Well, I could name a few, but never mind.)

Anyway, Frank was clearly straddling several chairs. He was at home in the pop music world (kind of), in the rock and alternative music sphere, but he also had this love for Varese and Stravinsky. And eventually the classical world discovered him and started playing his music. He, just as Gershwin before him, become part of the Classical Establishment. (Gershwin very much longed for it, Zappa maybe less.)

Zappa was a very powerful figure, he seems to have incarnated with a ready blueprint for what to do on Earth. I think when he checked out there was little if any regrets. I feel a bit related to his sort, in not being content with sitting on just one musical chair.

But let’s look at him from the perspective of Present Day Composer (PDC). Zappa had something PDC lacks, an audience, a following, fans. He was weird and strange but not an outsider. PDC on the other hand is often neither weird or strange but is, in a deep sense, an outsider.

So Zappa had the wind at his back: success, feedback, applause, great musicians who wanted to play with him, groupies, etc. All this is something PDC usually only dreams about.

Zappa was also skillful enough to write music that was good enough for PDC-audiences (I have myself played Zappa in concert.) And of course this audience, especially its younger members, welcomes something that finally is digestible, tasteful, hip, fun and hysterically irreverent.

In a way Zappa was what one hoped for from real PDC-s, but seldom got. And because of that one settled for paler, lamer, weaker, watered down concoctions of Philip Glass, Hans Zimmer, John Williams (the best of these) plus sundry computer game music composers. It’s like a miserable marriage.

Zappa was in a way too good to be true: Wrote real cutting, modern things but also had character enough not to take himself seriously. Plus he had that exotic air and attraction; one never knew if a couple of stoned groupies would turn up, something that practically never happened in Darmstadt.

So in a way a new Zappa is what needs in the PDC field. With or without the popular music background. Somebody free from the by now (bad) old habits of the PDC, somebody who can attract an intelligent audience what wants more than the middle-of-the-road banalities of, say, Michael Nyman.

The second evening takes place in a black box in a small theater that feels alternative, counter-culture, bohemian (choose your preferred alternative).

Again the place is full, which means about 50-60 souls. This is an evening in T-major, key of Translation. I have basically a good time. Musical theater, happenings and performances can be interesting/ tedious / pretentious, but I would say that this evening was one of the better ones.

Four performers who both play, sing (a bit) and act, give us something with a philosophical tinge. Actually it reminds me of what I do in my “mindfulosophical” meetings. Let’s just say that we took a Baby Elephant Walk, around the elephant Translation.

From word to film
From music to LED lights in the dark
From Hungarian to English / French / corpo di lingua
From cello to percussion and violin
Etc.

Once could have gotten into deep waters, in a good way, about the whole subject of translation (I waited for something about synesthesia), but a performance is a performance, not a workshop. Seeds are planted, not made to bloom, at least not instantly.

I liked the idea of four people listening to the same peace and letting it “conduct” their facial movements. Pity it was choreographed, thus a bit sing-song.

This was a good example or specimen of something I know quite well from before, but it is not for the man in the street. There is an interesting meditative atmosphere that can evolve around these kinds of performances.

The actual tones and rhythms don’t much matter. F or F sharp, who really cares? We listeners move more into the Room of Perception. And that room has been very occupied the last hundred years, which does not mean that it has been crowded — for few people are interested in the room — only that much of modern music activity takes place in a sphere of perceptual exercises.

That was what Concept Art was about. Look at this glass of water. Actually it’s not REALLY a glass of water, it’s an OAK TREE that just happens to look like a glass of water. Wow.

That is one of the funnier examples of Concept Art, but often it was very easy to keep from laughing.

Perceptual exercises should perhaps not be called art. When John Cage ask the audience to listen to the coughs in the concert hall the audience gets pretentious and conceited. “Oh, so THIS is the new Avant-garde In-thing, listening to coughs…? Let’s do it!”

Listening to coughs can be a good mindfulness exercise. Being present to sounds without judging and valuating them as good, bad, musical, non-musical can be mind broadening (and I remember how programming synthesizers made me aware of everyday sounds, noise, bird song, in a novel and refreshing way).

YES, BUT IS IT ART?

Some people abhor that question, some for horrible reasons, some because of an artistic stance. Personally I hold that Art died in the 1960s. Executioner: Concept Art. When everything is art, nothing is art; then art as something specific no longer exists. And we live in post-concept-art times, where the damage done by Concept Art is still not healed.

Of course that is just one view (although not common) around the elephant. Another view says that music has broadened thanks to the conceptual exercises. In a way it has, but other things have “broadened” as well. There is since the 60s a large, open door for free-wheeling opportunists with a talent for self-promotion. Concept Art Credo: “if somebody says it’s art, it’s art.” And if somebody says he is an artist, he is an artist?

I mean, it takes no effort or talent for me to come up with an idea, let’s say translating the numerical values of the words of this text into a musical score. I just came up with that idea, and it’s not art. It’s just neurons doing a semi-new, semi-original connection.

The “art” could lie in me actually realizing this, which I can’t be bothered to do. So then “art” = the bother, the energy expended, the effort to realize, build, construct something not intrinsically artful or wonderful.

How much more exiting the other end of the spectrum is! the truly wonderful thing that is just half-finished, quarter-realized; let’s say half a beautiful melody that is neither polished nor orchestrated, maybe not even notated or recorded.

More of that, please, and less of the other sort.

One more move around the elephant: I am critical about these things, clearly, but from experience, not inexperience. When a teenager I lived for this kind of music and these manifestation of art. Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Webern & Co. was my daily fare. It was infinitely more EXITING than Mozart or Weber.

I read somewhere that listening to avant-garde music makes you intelligent, and looking at myself I tend to agree. Because Stravinsky’s Agon for example is much harder to “figure out” than a Beethoven Ländler. Figuring things out helps your intelligence, and being drawn to adventurous music is a sign of being progressive.

Imagining myself never having heard Messian, Schönberg, Ligeti, Partch, Henze and all the other modernist — no, I wouldn’t want to be that person. I would be poorer, stiffer, squarer.

However, not getting stuck in that corner is just as important. Don’t park, circulate! The values I see in Sinatra, The Incredible String band or Aerosmith are as important as Liszt, and trumps much 20th century music. Also, when we move into the aleatoric corner there really is not much to figure out (just go with the flow), so again intelligence goes down ,-(

Dead composers are the best. I am not trying to be reactionary or macabre here, but as things are in this imperfect world the composer — as a person — often casts a shadow over his own music.

Let’s admit it — while we live we composers (as many other folks) are caught up in the race for fame, money, popularity — and commissions. This brings out our less than exalted sides.

Our music may be beautiful and captivating, but unless we are worldly successful chances are good (that is, bad) that we are struggling to be heard, suffering from not being heard and trying all kinds of media tricks for getting into the pages of history.

We might try to be interesting by talking about our weird sex life, or suffering from this or that four-letter disease. We might ask a colleague to write the liner notes to our CD, praising us as if we were a new Beethoven. Sometimes we are so mercantile that the line between “composer” and “shopkeeper” disappears.

Or we might try to gatecrash the League of Great Composers, like this.

(Picture: Wikipedia.) It is bad enough to see Philip Glass on the list, but where did Shlonsky, between Prokofiev and Shostakovitch, come from?
These are some of the imperfect aspects of composers. Not to mention that we are often odd. Beethoven or Wagner would have a slim chance of borrowing a sofa in this couch-surfing world of ours.

Let the music talk for it self, we sometimes say, but for that the composer needs to dead. After death all worldly struggle, ambitions, suffering and hardships are gone. Only the best part, the music, remains.

As I see it, a very important factor for a budding composer is that he should like his own music. People talk about technique, orchestration, harmony, counterpoint, all kinds of talent one needs. I seldom hear about self-love.

The music you write should not make anyone writhe, especially not you. [Unless that´s exactly what you want. But then we are talking S-M.] It should be enjoyable to YOU, preferably physically enjoyable. And not because your are thinking of royalties, reputation or envious colleagues. (The exception: when your music, however beautiful, is performed by lazy musicians and bad orchestras. Then sweet enjoyment turns into bitter torture. Then one understands why Frank Zappa said he preferred to have his tricky music played by a sequencer.)

Ask yourself: Do I really enjoy listening to this piece of mine? If someone else had written it, would I still like it?

If not, give up composing.

I mean, if you don´t… it not even YOU enjoy your own music, what is the chance of others, non-family, total strangers, liking it?

Start with yourself, with pleasing yourself.

There´s of course the possibility that you are to easy to please. You love your music — but nobody else does. Then so be it; there´s no accounting for taste. At least ONE person is enjoying it…. Also, you probably have not met everybody yet and you might still find and build a fan-base in Alaska.

Or, maybe you are a hack, writing music that others enjoy very much, but which for you means nothing more than making a living or doing your craft. Love doesn´t enter the picture, at least not as much as the dollar.